General News

Vuk Mandic, a member of the LIGO collaboration and Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy will deliver the Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics Public Lecture, Observing the Universe with Gravitational Waves. The lecture will take place in the Bell Museum Auditorium at 7:00 p.m. on October 13, 2016.

Abstract

Advanced LIGO gravitational-wave detectors recently recorded the first signals coming from mergers of binary black hole systems, marking the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy and astrophysics. For the first time we are able to observe and study the universe with gravitational waves, and to learn about objects never observed before. Dr. Mandic will describe the LIGO detectors and the events they recorded, and he will discuss the implications of these observations as well as expectations for future observations.

Prof Mandic's lecture will be followed by a Q&A session.

About the Speaker

Vuk Mandic received his Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley in 2004, working on direct searches for dark matter with the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment. Between 2004 and 2007 he was a Millikan Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, where he joined the field of gravitational waves and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Dr. Mandic has been a member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota since 2007, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He received the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship award in 2010-2012.